US rights activist Rosa Parks dies

Rosa Lee Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement in the US, has died aged 92.

25 Oct 2005 05:52 GMT

Parks is known as the mother of the civil rights movement

Parks died of natural causes on Monday evening at her home, with close friends by her side, said Gregory Reed, a lawyer who represented her for the past 15 years.

Parks was 42 when she committed an act of defiance in 1955 that was to change the course of American history and earn her the title "mother of the civil rights movement".

At that time, segregation laws in place since the post-Civil war Reconstruction required separation of the races in buses, restaurants and public accommodations throughout the south, while legally sanctioned racial discrimination kept blacks out of many jobs and neighbourhoods in the north.

The Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress, an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), was on a city bus on 1 December 1955, when a white man demanded her seat.

Parks refused, despite rules requiring blacks to yield their seats to whites. Two black Montgomery women had been arrested earlier that year on the same charge, but Parks was jailed.

She was also fined $14.

Bus boycott

Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said he felt a personal tie to the civil rights icon: "She stood up by sitting down. I'm only standing here because of her."

The Reverend Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist, called Parks "a gentle woman whose single act changed the most powerful nation in the world... One of the highlights of my life was meeting and getting to know her."

A bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr followed Parks' act

Speaking in 1992, Parks said history too often maintained "that my feet were hurting and I didn't know why I refused to stand up when they told me. But the real reason of my not standing up was I felt that I had a right to be treated as any other passenger. We had endured that kind of treatment for too long."

Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organised by the then little-known Baptist minister, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, who later earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.

"At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this," Parks said 30 years later. "It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in."

The Montgomery bus boycott, which came one year after the Supreme Court's landmark declaration that separate schools for blacks and whites were "inherently unequal", marked the start of the modern civil rights movement in the United States.

Civil Rights Act

The movement culminated in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.

After taking her public stand for civil rights, Parks had trouble finding work in Alabama. Amid threats and harassment, she and her husband Raymond moved to Detroit in 1957.

"I am leaving this legacy to all of you ... to bring peace, justice, equality, love and a fulfilment of what our lives should be"

Civil rights activist Rosa Parks

She worked as an aide in the Detroit office of Democratic US Representative John Conyers from 1965 until retiring in 1988. Raymond Parks died in 1977.

Parks became a revered figure in Detroit, where a street and middle school were named after her and a papier-mache likeness of her was featured in the city's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Parks said upon retiring from her job with Conyers that she wanted to devote more time to the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development.

The institute, incorporated in 1987, is devoted to developing leadership among Detroit's young people and initiating them into the struggle for civil rights.

Rosa Parks: My Story, was published in February 1992.

In 1994 she brought out Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation, and in 1996 a collection of letters called Dear Mrs Parks: A Dialogue With Today's Youth.

Million Man march

She was among the civil rights leaders who addressed the Million Man march in October 1995.

Parks was among rights leadersto address the march in 1995

In 1996, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to civilians making outstanding contributions to American life. In 1999, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation's highest civilian honour.

Parks received dozens of other awards, ranging from induction into the Alabama Academy of Honour to an NAACP Image Award for her 1999 appearance on the CBS television drama series Touched by an Angel.

The Rosa Parks Library and Museum opened in November 2000 in Montgomery. The museum features a 1955-era bus and a video that recreates the conversation that preceded Parks' arrest.

"Are you going to stand up?" the bus driver asked.

"No," Parks answered.

"Well, by God, I'm going to have you arrested," the driver said.

"You may do that," Parks responded.

Parks' later years were not without difficult moments.

Parks Institute struggles

In 1994, Parks' home was invaded by a 28-year-old man who beat her and took $53. She was treated at a hospital and released. The man, Joseph Skipper, pleaded guilty, blaming the crime on his drug problem.

Outkast was sued by Parks forusing her name as a song title

The Parks Institute struggled financially since its inception. The charity's principal activity - the annual Pathways to Freedom bus tour taking students to the sites of key events in the civil rights movement - routinely cost more money than the institute could raise.

Parks lost a 1999 lawsuit that sought to prevent the hip-hop duo Outkast from using her name as the title of a Grammy-nominated song. In 2000, she threatened legal action against an Oklahoma man who planned to auction internet domain name rights to rosaparks.com.

After losing the Outkast lawsuit, attorney Gregory Reed, who represented Parks, said his client "has once again suffered the pains of exploitation".

A later suit against Outkast's record company was settled out of court.

She was born Rosa Louise McCauley on 4 February 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Family illness interrupted her high school education, but after she married Raymond Parks in 1932, he encouraged her and she earned a diploma in 1934.

He also inspired her to become involved in the NAACP.

Concerns for youth

Looking back in 1988, Parks said she worried that black young people took legal equality for granted.

Older blacks, she said "have tried to shield young people from what we have suffered. And in so doing, we seem to have a more complacent attitude".

"We must double and redouble our efforts to try to say to our youth, to try to give them an inspiration, an incentive and the will to study our heritage and to know what it means to be black in America today."

At a celebration in her honour that same year, she said: "I am leaving this legacy to all of you ... to bring peace, justice, equality, love and a fulfilment of what our lives should be.

"Without vision, the people will perish, and without courage and inspiration, dreams will die - the dream of freedom and peace."